Close.io is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool which allows us to keep a much better track of our sales process. Here we are able to store the contact details for all existing and potential customers. When existing customers contact us, all of our previous correspondence with them will be in one place, reducing the need for back-and-forth emails.

These are some of the features we have been using to make the most of the tool:

Smart Views

Close.io stores a huge amount of data. An easy way of making sense of all this information is to use the Smart Views. Here you can create your own filtered views. For example we have ones which shows us leads created this week, and others for people who are interested in the individual products that we sell.

Follow Ups

One of our key objectives was to improve how we follow up with potential customers. After sending emails to new leads it is easy to forget to do this, or lose track of who you have and have not emailed. Close.io allows you to set reminders every time you send an email, meaning that each day all we have to do is work through our list of previously set reminders.

Reporting

Not only does close.io store all our data for us, it also helps us to analyse it. The Reporting tab gives us information that we can use to improve our sales process. For example, we can see how many people are opening our emails and how many are responding. In the example below the first email has a lower open rate but a higher response rate. This tells us that we could try changing the email subject of the first to get more people to open it, or try changing the content of the second to see if this improves the response rate.

With reporting we are also able to keep track of the number of leads we have over time:

All of these features make it easier for us to monitor our sales process, and help us think of new ideas for changing and improving it.

Are you using close.io? What are your thoughts?

If you’re a first-time reader, or simply want to be notified when we post new articles and updates, you can keep up to date by social media (Twitter, Facebook and Google+) or the Blog RSS.

Bethan Palmer FollowBethan is a Java developer and product manager for JPedal at IDRsolutions. She has spoken at conferences including JavaOne and NetBeans day and has a degree in English Literature.